


Unicorns

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Anal Sex, Double Penetration, M/M, Mpreg, Murder, Muteness, Oral Sex, Pedophilia, Psychological Trauma, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Slight A/B/O elements, Spitroasting, Suicide Attempt, Whump, emetophobia warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 17:05:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1695851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kink meme fill.</p>
<p>An 11-year-old Armin witnesses two members of the Military Police murder his parents, and they force themselves on him to keep him quiet. The aftermath renders him mute, pregnant, and barely able to cope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unicorns

When you were eleven, you were a bit more curious than cautious. Back then you crept toward the things that scared you — inched toward the faces of your bullies and called them out on their behavior, tried to study the bugs that stung you, stared down the darkness until you knew nothing lurked in the shadows. So that early January night, when your mother’s scream jolted you awake, you followed the subsequent murmurs down the hallway.

You tried to parse out what might be going on in your parents’ bedroom before you peeked through the crack in the door. Someone had lit a candle, and men — men who were not your father — were talking over the hushed rustle of fabric, but you heard only their voices and not their words. You couldn’t make sense of it. You knew it had to be bad; you knew bad. You’d watched Wall Maria crumble to the ground, and Shiganshina fall to the blood-dribbling maws of Titans, so you knew bad, you thought.

That night would teach you that “bad” sometimes meant wishing for, rather than escaping, death.

Through the crack you saw colors: the candle’s yellow glow fading to dark, pools of red on the wood floor. You backed away that instant with a sharp gasp you stifled with a hand over your mouth. But you were curious, not cautious. Not knowing was the worst thing, you thought. Slowly you leaned over again. You pounded the details into your mind.

Though the angle of the candlelight silhouetted them, the two men holding down your mother on the bed were members of the Military Police. The unicorns emblazoned onto the backs of their jackets told you that. Meanwhile, your father, whom you could only identify from the flat feet facing you, lay on the floor. One of them held his hand down on your mother’s mouth. The other lifted a hatchet into the air. Your mother struggled beneath the weight. You remember even then being glad you couldn’t see her face.

“Get it right the first time,” said the policeman restraining her. “Don’t fuck it up and make a mess like with him.” He cocked his head toward your father — his body — his corpse — on the floor.

The other policeman grunted something indignant in reply. He seemed to be carefully measuring the angle of the hatchet, lifting it up and down slightly. At this point you remember shaking your head and growing dizzy just from that motion. Regardless you shuffled a step to the side to try to get a look at more of your father than just his motionless, blood-splattered feet. In doing so, you saw the hatchet swing down onto your mother’s neck only out of the corner of your eye.

She stopped struggling then, and you stopped shuffling. All that moved between the two of you was your stomach.

For a while you saw only shapes, twisting and turning, and you thought that maybe this meant you were dreaming, and you could wake up and run to your parents in this very bed and tell them what had happened and slip between them and sleep in their warmth. You’d had dreams like that before, dreams where people died, or were going to die, and they seemed so real that you could feel the back of your throat vibrate when you tried to scream, but you woke up anyway, and by the end of the day, you were fine and happy and going to sleep easy. That night, though, the corporeality of it all settled on your skin like snow. You knew the difference between the atmosphere of a dream and that of reality. You felt it like a barrier between the air and your body. This was the world you could not escape.

The men were saying things while they moved the pieces of your parents to a corner. “Fucking Scouts,” and “That’ll teach them,” and “Better be worth it.” They produced what seemed to be large sacks or tarps, and then you couldn’t see your parents anymore, only lumps under tan canvas. You knew how wide your eyes had grown from how quickly they dried out.

Then one of the policemen said something like, “You see that,” and before you could even think that tearing back down the hallway into your bedroom was an option, the door opened and two shadows fell on you.

You’ll never forget them. You will be an ancient, tortured, shriveled relic on a death bed and you will remember them. The policemen stood roughly the same height, well over six feet, glaring down at you. One gritted his teeth while the other sneered. The former was a swarthy, olive-skinned man with thick, shaggy hair and thicker stubble on his face; the latter had blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, and even in the dark of the shadow in which he lingered you could tell his eyes were pale blue, paler blue than yours, the color of the needle-tip of an icicle. You thought that he would hurt you worse, but you scold yourself for that now; the blood soaking their shirts and jackets should have told you that they’d both make you worse than you could imagine.

It was the dark one that yanked you into the bedroom by your shoulder. His hand, easily the size of your entire chest, left a greasy red print on your nightshirt. He kept his focus on you, but when he spoke, it was to his accomplice: “Think it saw?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Kid’s an Arlert. They said make sure none of the Arlerts ever speak again, and we already got two of them.” He snickered, but it wasn’t a laugh as much as it was a sharp, smiling breath through his nose. The breeze of it smacked your cheek. “Now we got the baby.”

But you weren’t a baby to them, not even a baby Arlert. You were an it. They’d said it, and the way the swarthy one studied you while the blond strode back to retrieve the hatchet from the bed proved it. His eyes, two black gleaming voids, scanned you up and down until they focused on what you knew from a tingle to be your lips. You couldn’t ask what that look meant. Even if you could have opened your mouth, all you would have done, you’re sure, was vomit.

“Nah, don’t. Put it back.” He gave his order to the blond without ever looking away from you. When he grinned, his tongue slid along the top row of his flat white teeth. “I got a better idea.”

He cocked his head as if to point at you with his chin, the same motion he’d made toward your father’s corpse earlier. The blond approached the two of you again and looked you up and down. You trembled. The bloody handprint on your shoulder was drying already, crusty and cool, and that, even more than their gazes, made you feel like a slab of meat, because really, their looks were not those of hungry men on food — they were of vandals on a blank wall. They were going to leave their mark on you just for the sake of it.

The blond nodded and said to the dark one, “You do the honors,” and your head knocked hard against the mattress before your body did.

You don’t remember which you noticed first: his hands tearing your nightshirt open or his mouth on yours. They could have happened at the same time. His mouth tasted sick, scummy, worse where his tongue groped along yours, and everywhere he touched you became smeared with your parents’ blood. You wondered how so much blood could stain two hands. You were naked before you had an answer, and by then, you’d forgotten about the blood; what you wanted to know then was what either of these men could want from kissing you and stripping your clothes away. What could you give them? You, an eleven-year-old boy.

The policeman’s hand rubbed much too hard down the length of your chest and stomach, and then he began pulling, again and again, on the shaft of your penis. You yelped into his mouth, struggled underneath him, but even rocking in place barely did anything. Getting out would never happen if sending him rattling just the tiniest bit couldn’t.

“Calm your ass down,” the policeman said, his lips grazing yours when he pronounced the word ‘your.’ He reached up with his other hand, bearing his weight on your body, and wove his fingers through your hair to control your head: he wanted you to look at him, and when you realized this, you realized that, maybe, if you complied, he’d show you some degree of mercy that wasn’t this. He was so heavy. Breathing grew painful. You noticed his irises were almost as dark as his pupils, and you thought, he’s a shadow, he’s only a shadow, he’s dark and heavy but he’s only a shadow, he can only do but so much.

He kept jerking your penis with his thumb bearing hard against the head and his knuckles digging into your balls. The blonde policeman was snickering. The one on top of you said, “You’re not gonna tell anyone what you saw. You’re gonna do everything we say and be a good slut for us both and you’re not gonna say a word about it afterward, you got it? Because…” And again he was pointing with his chin, this time around the room: he knew where you lived. Obviously.

‘Slut,’ though. You’d never heard that word before. From the context you imagined it meant some kind of pet, but because of the way he said it, you pictured a mange-ridden dog, and you couldn’t make sense of it. But if he wanted you to be a mange-ridden dog, you’d be a mange-ridden dog. You’d be anything he wanted you to be if he’d leave you be. You nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Get up.”

It was an empty command, as he pulled you up, then. You caught a glimpse of your stomach and lap, the splotches of blood painting your skin. He and the blond policeman guided you onto your knees; the former stood before you, unzipping his pants, while the latter knelt behind you, which you found far more menacing. For a long while he only nestled back there, alternately keeping his hands on your shoulders or your hips, but from the way he squeezed them sometimes you knew he had something planned. The dark-haired policeman grabbed you by the back of your head again, which halted your thought process. With his other hand he reached into his loosened pants, and, sickened, you could only watch as he revealed his penis.

The only one you’d seen before was your own, so his, long and thick as your lower arm, fully and almost throbbingly erect, with one fat purple vein running the length of the side, forced you to swallow in haste the glob of bile that rose in your throat at the sight of it. He pulled your head upward and close to it, and then he answered the next question that you were beginning to wish you could ask: “Suck my cock.”

Tears pulsated with the force of a migraine behind your eyes, and you might even have been silently letting them roll down your cheeks. You couldn’t think about that. Your head swelled with pain and you were making your jaws loose and your tongue go slack so you could aid him as he guided his penis — his cock, all these words — into your mouth. Once, back in Shiganshina, a fat bully named Karl-Heinz had shoved you up against a wall in a half-nelson right as you’d opened your mouth to tell him to leave you alone, and in doing so, you’d gotten the taste in your mouth of the smell of his wet, salty armpit, stale from the fabric of his stained shirt, and this man’s cock tasted scarcely any different. You let it crawl like some gorged slug across your tongue, until it hit the back of your throat. You gagged. Quickly you told yourself to breathe through your nose.

So weak, you thought, you were so weak, you were pitiful. It seemed that no sooner had he started plunging his cock in and out of your mouth than you sobbed aloud at the pain that seeped out from having to hold your mouth open. You wished you could unhinge your jaws like a snake. You wished you were a snake, so you could devour him, or poison him, or wrap yourself around his neck and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until not only did his breathing stop, but his head snapped off and a bloody stump remained, just like your parents under the tarp, and then he’d know, then he’d know. Your tongue burned from the friction. You were pitiful. The other policeman was groping your rear and whispering things that you felt more than heard, felt as hot slime condensing on your earlobe: “You got such a nice little ass, baby, I’m gonna fuck that little cunt of yours so hard you’ll break in half, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, my big hard cock up your tight little pussy?” He, too, had taken his cock out of his pants and rested it against the cleft of your ass.

At that point, you accepted that he would follow through with his sticky promises, and that the other policeman would have your mouth for as long as he wanted. You were just that pitiful.

And then he pulled out. He was snickering when he did it, and you looked up at his face as if to ask why, but he was looking behind you, and with his hand still controlling the movement of your head, you couldn’t turn around to look. You heard a nightstand drawer shutting, not that you’d heard it open.

“God damn, are we lucky,” the blond policeman said.

The one in front of you grinned wide, then, taking some kind of hint, and knelt on the floor. “Lube him up, then,” he said.

The policeman behind you took you by the shoulders and guided you onto your hands and knees, then held you in place by crouching over your ankles, locking them down with his own. He took off his jacket and tossed it aside. The dark one nudged the tip of his cock against your lips, and, on the verge of tears but trying only to survive, you let it back in.

You felt two things at once: the blond’s left hand on your left hip, and something hard, blunt, burning, and slick at your hole. His cock. He must have used whatever he’d found in the nightstand to oil himself up. Your body was steadily disobeying you, trying to force your head to turn around and gaze back at him and shake your head at him. No, your body screamed, no, please, don’t, I don’t want this, why are you doing this, but it opened up anyway and let him push inside.

For less than a second you screamed around the other man’s cock. He slapped you for it. “Shut up,” he said. “You know you like it.”

You couldn’t make that true. All you could do then was fall silent and let them fuck both ends of you, but you were lousy at that, too. Every few seconds you had to fight the urge to scream by swallowing your tears and your saliva and the salty fluid leaking from the dark-haired policeman’s cock, and whimpering. The blond policeman was ripping you open. A mix of fluids, the oil and blood from your torn tissue, dripped down your inner thigh. He bent forward to whisper in your ear again.

“Give it up,” he said. “Come on, baby. Gonna fill you up, make your ass pregnant. Keep your little pussy open for me, slut, lemme put a baby in you.”

He called you “baby” so many times, but didn’t at all treat you like one. His thrusts came hard, slamming into you, sending your knees scraping on the rug until you were sure you were bleeding there, too. Worst of all, every time he pounded into you, he send your whole body jerking forward, which sent the other man’s cock further down your throat. You tried to breathe through your nose, but his cock stopped the air from traveling any further than just behind your tongue. Soon you were gagging in time with each thrust. You couldn’t keep up. You went dizzy, from lack of air and from pain and from the nausea that had seized you since the moment you heard your mother scream—scream from the head that was now separated from her body—and with your last bubble of air you sobbed and you gagged one more time and—

Everything stopped when the dark-haired policeman howled a swear. Shaking, you pushed yourself up from the floor, able to breathe again, nothing penetrating you at either end. He’d stood up. You’d vomited onto his cock and the floor.

“Fucking little slut,” he growled. You cried out when his fist met your cheek. “Teach you a lesson,” he said, then, to his accomplice: “Get him on the bed. Soon as I clean this shit up, we’re gonna tear him wide open.”

From behind you, the blond grabbed you by the neck and hauled you onto your wobbling feet. He sat on the edge of your parents’ bed, his clean, oiled cock still huge and erect and striped with your blood. This was the bed where your parents had slept. This was the bed covered in their blood. This is the bed in which they were murdered. And he pulled you into his lap and forced you onto his cock. You went limp. You let him do whatever he wanted.

He knew your mouth probably still tasted like vomit, so he wouldn’t kiss you there, but he kissed your neck. He bit into it, left bruises and speckles of red where he brought your blood almost to the surface. He rolled your nipples between his fingers and grabbed your ass, sank his nails into it, scratched the surface of it, left long lines trailing up from it to just under your shoulder blades. He moved your hips up and down and thrust up into you.

“You like that?” he asked, hoarse in your ear. “Say you like it. Tell me you love it.”

You had to take such a deep breath in order to lie. “I love it,” you murmured.

“What do you love?”

You stammered. “Your cock.”

“Tell me what you love.”

“Your—” you told yourself, just say it, Armin, there’s no use fighting it “—your cock in my ass.”

He hummed against the pillar of your neck. “Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good little slut. God, you feel good.”

You closed your eyes, and when you opened them, another Military Police jacket fell onto the bed. The blond lay down, making sure to keep you sitting upright and impaled on his cock, while another set of hands pushed you a bit forward. The dark-haired one had returned. He muttered something like “now then,” and when you felt the slippery head of his cock pushing at your already filled entrance, you gave up. You were gone. You left yourself.

Part of you felt him push in alongside the blond. Your felt the tearing, you felt every thrust from the both of them, and it was the kind of pain you didn’t think you’d ever stop feeling, but you pretended you couldn’t feel any of it. You fixed your sight on the unicorn that decorated the back of the policeman’s jacket. In flickers of moments, it became a full-sized, fully developed creature, and you mounted its back and it galloped away, taking you away from this room and these men and those corpses and this night. Two men sworn to protect the people who lived within the walls had murdered your parents and were now violating you as punishment, breaking your body as much as your mind, but in those moments you rode that unicorn. You rode it far away, the tip of its horn guiding its path.

In the interims, though, two massive cocks had broken their way into you. The men pulled your hair and scratched at you and bit you and slapped you and choked you, all the while saying things like, “Good boy, I like it when you squeeze your little cunt around me like that,” and “Want you to have my baby,” and “Pretty, you’re so hot, baby, take it in your little pussy,” and you were only a child, helpless to fight back or escape.

You deserved this, you thought. What else did you expect, knowing how weak you were, when you watched them behead your parents?

They told you to take it and you took it. Their orgasms came within moments of one another, grunting and seizing, and load after load shot in fiery waves into you. After they pulled out, they smeared their softening cocks across your thighs, partially to clean them but mostly to make a mess of you. They slapped you around a little bit more, and they were laughing together as their silhouettes and the unicorns on their jackets disappeared from your view.

This was how they left you: on top of your parents’ bed, bound at the wrists and ankles by belts of your father’s they scrounged from the closet, stained with your parents’ blood, a torn strip of bed sheet tied around your mouth, naked, blood and oil and semen trickling from your aching hole. You didn’t even try to sleep. In that much pain, you could barely think, but you tried, at least, to whisk yourself away via imagination to a beach like the one you saw illustrated in your parents’ forbidden book. But then you realized that that book was probably the reason they’d been killed, and in that instant you switched to the unicorn. You wished you had something further removed from the policemen to concentrate on, but the unicorn seemed to work. Unicorns, after all, weren’t real; if you thought about something that wasn’t real, you could feel for a moment like none of this was.

All the way until sunup the corpses of your mother and father tainted the air; the scent of viscera overtook the lingering smell of your mother’s hair and your father’s skin woven into the quilt. By midmorning, when your grandfather came over with Eren and Mikasa and discovered you, you had forgotten what their bodies had smelled like alive.

The rest of that day whirled around you. Doctors and policemen, intrusive examinations from which you couldn’t recoil, questions upon questions; everything prodded at you, but the questions were so pointless. When the doctor asked whether this or that bruise hurt, or when you’d had your last heat (and if you’d had one yet at all), or whether the attacker had done this or that to you, you remembered that you’d been told not to say a word, so you didn’t, about anything. And when the policemen asked you questions, you wouldn’t have bothered answering them if you could, because you knew they were only going through the motions of investigating the crime. At the end of the day they declared the murder and rape—yet another new word for you—the acts of random criminals, and off they went, promising they’d find the culprits.

You know now that they never filed a single slip of paperwork.

After a few days with the doctor, your grandfather took you back to his house, where, your attending nurse said, your “recovery would really begin.” But how could you recover when one of the first things you had to do upon your discharge was attend your parents’ funeral? When you had to sleep in a new room, and find new paths around the streets, and share a room with your best friend, and get used to a new person’s cooking? There were so many little things, and those made the recovery impossible. Grandpa woke up before sunrise, made dinner in the mid-afternoon, and was in bed by eight-thirty, leaving you restless and awake for upwards of four hours. You had never gone to sleep without at least one of your parents telling you goodnight immediately before you blew out your candle, and you had never had dinner before sunset in the winter. You didn’t fault Grandpa; you knew you should fault two men of the Military Police, though you faulted yourself far more often.

For the rest of that winter and into the spring, you fell into routine, but you never recovered. You stayed silent. You opened your mouth to eat or yawn, but never to speak. Eren and Mikasa, though they didn’t know the full details of what had happened to you, seemed to understand, and they defended you as always, and accepted your new ways of communicating, all nods and head-shakes and gestures. If only you could hug them, you thought sometimes. If only you could hug them, but so many caveats prevented you from ever doing it that you could never settle on one. What did they get out of you?

What did anyone get out of you? Though he didn’t quite dote on you, Grandpa did seem to enjoy your presence. Daily he smiled at you, made comments about how you seemed to be getting along well, you were gaining weight, weren’t you a smart boy. Maybe he’d been lonely, you thought. After all, your grandmother had died before you were born, making you the first relative he’d lived with in years. Even so, you were suspicious of how much joy an old man could get out of having to tend to his invalid, mute grandson and his two friends day after day. He could find something better; surely, so could Eren and Mikasa.

One day in mid-July the three of you were heading out to pick up some groceries when Eren suggested you split up. There was something he wanted to do—you don’t remember what—so he wanted to get the chores done quickly. You divided the money, and Eren went to the butcher, Mikasa to the bakery, and you to the street of produce stands.

You should have known what an easy target you were. You still scold yourself for focusing so hard on those plums rather than anything else around you. But you were craving plums for some reason, and you took one after another and placed them in your basket, and as you gazed down at them salivating, strolling toward the next stand, a trio of slightly older boys you knew from the neighborhood corralled you into the nearby alley.

“Give it up, pussy,” the biggest one said. His name was Wilhelm and his breath smelled of old milk, so when he breathed his command into your face—a command you knew all too well—your reflexes forced you to grimace.

Wilhelm smacked you hard behind the temple. “Said gimme your money, Arlert. I’m too hungry to kick your ass for however shitty much you got on you.”

If what you had in your pocket was your allowance, you’d have handed it over. But it was money given to you by Grandpa for a specific purpose, and you needed those plums, so you shook your head, calling yourself pitiful despite working up the nerve to defy.

“God damnit,” Wilhelm said, sounding more disappointed than angry.

He smacked his open palm against your cheek so hard you lost your balance, but didn’t fall. One of the other boys, a short but stocky redhead, came around behind you despite your wobbling to get away, jostled the basket out of your hand, let it plummet, and grabbed you, restraining you with your arms behind your back. Wilhelm and the third boy then descended on you, beating you with their fists about your face and chest and kicking your legs.

You fell into the routine of getting pummeled. Going through worse had taught you to let your eyes close and picture that unicorn. It didn’t matter how bruised you’d come out when your only thought rested on a flowing white mane and silvery horn pointing skyward.

Eventually Wilhelm and the other boys apparently decided they’d gotten enough out of beating you. The redhead released you from his grip. Wilhelm punched your chest one last time, this time hard enough to send you flying toward the brick wall to your right. Your head thudded against it on the way down so hard you thought you felt your brain rattle in your skull; the pain made you cross-eyed for a split second, cross-eyed and stinging. One of the boys fished around in your pocket until he found the money, then the three of them left, and all you could think was how glad you were that his hand hadn’t ventured further toward your crotch or your ass. You lay there a while half because you felt you should, and half just for the sake of it.

When you finally got up and regrouped with Mikasa and Eren, they winced at the sight of some head injury you didn’t even realize you had. Mikasa vowed to hunt down the perpetrators, whom you couldn’t name, and you weren’t about to stop her, but you wanted to go home. You led the way back, basketless. Grandpa’s reaction to your injury was like those of your friends, only magnified. For his sake, you didn’t protest when he decided to take you to the doctor.

You hadn’t seen the doctor in months, but the two of you remembered each other equally well. How could you not, when he’d been the one to treat you after the attack? He was a youngish physician named Holst, and he’d built up a kind of rapport with you that you imagined from the outside looked like the relationship between a marionette and its puppeteer in one of those shows you watched in passing on the streets. He talked, he laughed at his own jokes, he inferred answers from your gestures and looks, and you let him do all of it, utterly silent, predicting each and every thing he said before he said it. You liked him; you just wished you hadn’t met him the way you had.

Dr. Holst gave you four stitches on your forehead, and told you to take it easy for the next week or so. When you stood up to leave, though, he stopped you from heading to the door and knelt down, level to your stomach.

“Armin, has your stomach been feeling all right?” he asked. “You look a little distended.”

You shrugged. You’d had a slight, intermittent bout of some kind of stomach flu around March or April, but other than that, nothing. Dr. Holst asked if he could feel your stomach, and, to satisfy his curiosity, you allowed him to. Gently he lifted your shirt and pressed his hand down on a few spots around your belly, which, you admitted, had grown a bit. Eren had had a growth spurt about a year before, but just before he shot up a few inches, he’d gotten a little pudgy, so you figured you were merely due to, finally, get a little taller.

Dr. Holst bit his frowning lip when he told you to “lie on the bed for me, Armin.”

Within an hour you learned that you were pregnant. For six months you had been incubating the child of one of your parents’ murderers, and you had no idea. You left the exam room in tears, and you were still crying after Dr. Holst finished explaining the situation to Grandpa.

You spent the rest of the summer devoting yourself to disassociating from your body. It harbored something you didn’t want and arranged to surrender to an orphanage as soon as it expelled it. Yet no matter how you tried to distance yourself, every night you remembered the policemen, their teeth and their hair and a tongue and a cock in your mouth and the fluid, oh god, you realized, the sperm from both of them leaking out of you. They had taken the preceding link in your bloodline and then insinuated themselves into the next.

After a while you began to realize a kind of horror that you’d become pregnant before you even knew you were fertile. In December you’d spent a few days slick and cramping, but it embarrassed you more than it confused you, and then it ended as quickly as it had begun, lasting only three days or so. You decided you’d tell your father only if it happened again. But it didn’t happen again, and you couldn’t have told him if it had, and soon you’d forgotten it had happened at all.

Your eleven-year-old body held another inside it, and you wanted neither. In August you tried and failed to get rid of both bodies three times; by the end of the month you were still stuck inside yourself, branded with a burn scar on the knee, a fading knot underneath the still-healing concussion stitches, and a wide scab on the wrist. “You’re getting clumsy, dear,” Grandpa said.

Eren caught you the fourth time, in the first week of September. You were alone in the kitchen, slicing potatoes. They were so thick, so solid, and you marveled how little effort it took to run the knife through them. The scab on your wrist fell into your sight, and making one more slice through the potato, you realized: you should have sliced up, not across.

Dirty with potato juice, the knife gleamed against your skin when you placed the tip in the little ridge between your wrist bones. One clean slice, you thought, and you’d never have to think about that January night or your headless parents or cocks or anyone’s voice hissing “pussy” again, and you’d end two lives, neither of which should ever have been started in the first place. Best of all, you’d keep silent in the easiest way possible. How lovely, to be able to obey without having to think about it.

Then a hand yanked your wrist to the side, and the knife clattered onto the surface of the table. You hadn’t seen Eren come in, but he stood breathing wetly through his clenched teeth to your side, clinging to your arm. He swallowed a sob. His fingers wove between yours.

“Is this what you’ve been doing?” he asked.

You don’t remember breathing. You remember not having to answer, because he knew.

He squeezed your hand, his palm pressing against yours. He cried and you didn’t. “Please, Armin,” he said. “Please.”

You admired his courage to beg. You stood up, your weight making your swollen feet ache, and pulled him into a hug. The embrace as much as your staying alive were for him, and you loved him too much to resent him for needing you. He was selfish and you had no self.

So a month later you were still alive when on a Wednesday afternoon, spears of abdominal pain sent you back to Dr. Holst. You were in labor. Grandpa held your hand through the hours of agony, staying up far past his bedtime for you, for a great-grandchild he knew you didn’t want to give him. Your screams came out hoarse, the first sounds in months produced by a voice you no longer used.

“Push,” Dr. Holst told you, “push, Armin, push, come on, good job, keep pushing.” You pushed as hard as you could. You tried to push even harder than that, so hard that you’d split in half, just rip right down the middle like the blond policeman had said he’d make you before he thrust into you. No one could blame death during childbirth on suicide. You pushed and tore and longed to keep tearing until you felt nothing—until there was no more you to feel anything.

But you heard the shrill first cries of the baby, and you let yourself sink into your pillow, covering your eyes with your forearm. “It’s a girl,” Dr. Holst said.

A girl, your daughter, born close to midnight on October sixth, 847. You weren’t yet twelve.

You refused to look at her. If you did, you’d learn whether she was dark or blonde and you’d know which man had truly ruined you. Your tears soaked your arm while Dr. Holst and his nurses cleaned up the baby, swaddled her, and whisked her away to be tended to by anyone in the world but you.

You want to say you never saw her again, but first of all, you never saw her to begin with, and second, you have no real way of knowing if you’d seen her or not. Ever since you were a month shy of twelve, you knew that the possibility existed that, somewhere within the walls, there was a child who was half you. You always reminded yourself that she might have died at some point, as all children inside the walls have dismal mortality rates, but, like you, she could have survived. Even now, you examine the face of every little girl you pass, especially the ones that appear in orphanage herds, looking for any feature that reminds you of yourself, or of either of the policemen. The possibility—the probability—haunts you. You dream of the future, of yourself as a young man, on a break from your service, and you are approached by an eleven-year-old girl—sometimes dark-haired and olive-skinned, sometimes tall and blonde, but always with your eyes—and she follows you everywhere. No matter what you do, she finds you. You travel on horseback through the Forest of Giant Trees, over the distant mountains, across those things they call deserts, and finally to the beach, all while dodging Titan after Titan, and she still finds you. You give up, collapse on the sand, which in the dream feels like the blood-soaked quilt on your parents’ bed, and cry, and she lies down beside you and cries with you.

She and either of her potential fathers hunt down your thoughts. They barrage you. They will never let you speak. She, and how she was conceived, are things that Eren and Mikasa know better than to try to discuss with you, though you know they understand why you fix on every group of children with whom you cross paths.

It is not until after your grandfather has died outside Wall Rose, after you have joined the military, after you have graduated from training, after your best friend has been revealed as a Titan Shifter, after you have decided to join the Survey Corps, that you think, for the first time, that you have actually found her.

You are fifteen and it is early summer. You and the other new Survey Corps recruits, members of your graduating squad, are given a day to leave the base, go out into town, and relax. On days like this you are at a loss, since Eren is off being specially trained and monitored by some of the highest-up members of the Corps, and, without him, Mikasa doesn’t feel much like going out. You float; you go with whoever is willing to have you tag along.

Today it is Reiner and Bertholdt who let you come with them. You’ve been fairly close with them since early on in training, which in the beginning surprised you, until you realized that big, blond Reiner and tall, dark Bertholdt were like kind, considerate analogues of your attackers. They gave you something to transform those faces into when they descended upon you at night.

Reiner in particular is protective of you, and always has been. His efforts to care for you often made you feel like even more of a burden, but other times, you felt as if you could tell him anything, and he wouldn’t judge you; you considered letting him in on your past, probably by writing a letter you’d hand him, but you always decided not to. You couldn’t picture the words on the paper without feeling as if you needed to vomit.

Reiner offers you his hand so you don’t get separated in the crowd at the open air market, and on and off you take it. You’ve never liked crowds; you always feel there is someone staring at you, someone who knows you’re an Arlert and knows what has happened to you and blames you and it’s so paranoid you can’t believe yourself, but you can’t help it. You let Reiner lead the way, staring down at your shoes so you don’t have to see the people all around you.

Up ahead, Bertholdt stops at a stand selling some kind of clothing, you can’t really tell what; meanwhile, you and Reiner end up a stand away, where a middle-aged man with skin so suntanned it’s nearly turned to leather sells wood-carved figurines. While Reiner stands between your stand and Bertholdt’s, you inspect the figurines, not quite one by one, but in little bunches. The man has carved all sorts of animals: dogs, frogs, butterflies, birds, and, in the back, a unicorn.

It stands on a tiny platform, rearing up on its back legs. An imaginary gust sends its wooden mane flying. You look at the price tag; it’ll take nearly all of your money, and you aren’t quite sure what you’ll do with it, but you need it, and you point to the unicorn, stab your fistful of cash toward the artist, and it’s yours. You tuck it into your satchel.

It is safe with you and you are safe with it.

As the day goes on, you and Reiner and Bertholdt wander around, buy some food—Reiner, as always, is kind enough to pay for you—and settle in a park to eat and rest. They talk. You listen. It makes you sick to think this, but sometimes when Reiner tilts his head toward the sun, the way the light hits his face makes him look like the blond policeman. Whenever this happens, though, you reach into your satchel and feel around for the wooden unicorn.

You are in the middle of pressing your fingertip against the point of its horn when you see Reiner, and then, timidly, Bertholdt, wave toward someone. You follow the direction of their eyes: on the sidewalk, an old woman shaped like a sphere shepherds toward you a flock of children who wave back to your friends, and you recognize them immediately as orphans. There are about ten of them, all sizes, all ages, all colors. On reflex you begin scanning the girls, and when you find the smallest, your hand clenches so hard around the unicorn that you worry it may break.

She can’t be more than three, and she’s got thick, straight black hair hanging down to her shoulders, big round eyes, and a button nose. Your hand flies to your mouth, but you’re not gasping—you’re suppressing the surge roiling up from your stomach.

“Armin?” Bertholdt asks. “Are you all right?”

And you wish it weren’t Bertholdt asking you, because he’s the one who resembles the man you’re sure is that girl’s father, because you’re sure she’s yours, and Bertholdt scares you right then for no good reason. You’ve been clinging to the unicorn so tightly with your other hand that you didn’t even realize you’d brought it up to your chest until it was already there, cool against you.

Reiner is already chatting up the orphans’ caretaker, saying that it’s such a nice day out and were the kids enjoying it and is there anything the Survey Corps can do for them. “Just keep us safe,” the woman says. Nobody seems to notice you, or Bertholdt staring at you, or the obvious—god, it is so obvious, why doesn’t anyone see it, why can’t they just tell from looking at you what a busted little slut you are—resemblance between you and the little dark-haired girl.

And then the girl herself speaks, to you, and this, you feel, clinches it: “That’s so pretty,” she gasps.

She’s pointing at your unicorn. Moving your hand away from your mouth to feign a smile makes you want to cry, but you fight to do it anyway. You can’t cry. You have to see what this child looks like, what she’s become, and you wish you could speak so you could ask her if she’s being treated well and if she’s healthy and if she knows to fight back and tell her that even though you tried to kill yourself and her it wasn’t her fault, her own life wasn’t her fault, and that you’re so sorry she came into the world the way she did and just because you wish none of it had ever happened it doesn’t mean she’s worthless or undeserving of love or contaminated, no, not her, you’re the infected one, and you’re sorry you’re the one who gave birth to her, you’re so sorry—

She smiles. Blinks. When she opens her eyes, you notice: her eyes are a bright shade of green.

She isn’t yours.

She isn’t yours, and you wave weakly goodbye to her when she and her group leave. It rings in your ears that she isn’t yours, even over the sound of Bertholdt murmuring something to Reiner. You wonder why you’re disappointed, because you always told yourself how scared you were of ever coming across your child, but then, as you watch the girl skip along the sidewalk to scurry beside the caretaker, you realize: you just wanted the constant, involuntary searching to end.

It won’t, and you’re sure it never will. None of it will ever end.

Beside you, Reiner says, “Cool unicorn. She’s right, it is pretty.” And he’s smiling down at you, and you’re smiling back, and you’re clutching the unicorn, and you’re thinking:

This.

This is what I have to live with.


End file.
